if they make it a niche market for the super rich, then there's still the awkward engineering challenges (reducing the catastrophic failure rate of rockets, and making the G forces compatible with human comfort come to mind)

if they make it a niche market for the super rich, then there's still the awkward engineering challenges (reducing the catastrophic failure rate of rockets, and making the G forces compatible with human comfort come to mind)

there's a good quote from Burt Rutan that put's a few things into an observation of big or expansionist government perspective. who isn't such a corporate figurehead who's role depends on people sucking up to the corporate agenda

I put myself in the (Those who fear expansion of Government control) group, and do not hide the fact that I have a clear bias on Anthropogenic global warming (AGW). My bias is based on fear of Government expansion and the observation of AGW data presentation fraud – not based on financial or any other personal benefit. I merely have found that the closer you look at the data and alarmists’ presentations, the more fraud you find and the less you think there is an AGW problem... For decades, as a professional experimental test engineer, I have analyzed experimental data and watched others massage and present data. I became a cynic; My conclusion – “if someone is aggressively selling a technical product whose merits are dependent on complex experimental data, he is likely lying”. That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit.

On the whole it is not wise to bet against SpaceX. There have certainly been mistakes and upsets, but they have a phenomenal track record of innovation. For me it has been amazing to watch their progress over the last ten years.

Gwynne Shotwell (SpaceX President and COO):

"BFR system being designed for Earth hops. First test will be this type of launch..."

Earth will be a proving ground for this technology, before it reaches the Moon and Mars.

The f*** does that quote and your post have to do with this thread and interplanetary travel?

oh i'm sorry is there some kind of strict rule that dictates it specifically has to?

if you're too stupid or just lazy to work out that it pertains to the few messages preceding it then idk, maybe forum software of the future with ML will notify you of a slight OT so that you don't have to think to grasp the context

I think it's the last line of the quote, somehow that's good commentary on the subject of commercial space flights. But where's the technical mumbo jumbo, where's the sell. I have no idea. But it's a fantastic way to hamfist in your dislike of global warming. It's even funnier when you consider "complex data" as the foundation of nearly all scientific discovery... it;s even more confusing.

I was acknowledging a comment about the confusion over whether or not virgin galactic, which seems as though it's still informing people as the mainstay marketing by virgin for scaled composites, has brought the Ansari Xprize vision of taking people on a suborbital bounce and the complications which have long since almost shuttered the pursuit of

it was a program that even John Carmack was involved in with his Armadillo Aerospace interests, but i suppose the relatively pithy financing that selling 1 million+ or so copies of Doom allowed him to plough into a lofty aerospace goal of space tourism that isn't even showing signs of being bookable by the old money of airlines and tech

the potentially viable product is still only the vision, and the setbacks of losing test pilots and reflecting on just how difficult the realities of it are are much less acknowledged than an interesting and captivating speaker like Musk is or will ever talk about

And the over use of pinch point phrases like "it's 2017 already we should have a base on the Moon" and "we need to be multi-planetary it's inevitable" are so cringe and seem to disregard the efforts and losses of the space goals since what, sometime around the 1950's

I admit it's an interesting idea but in terms of commerciality it's a mental idea that will never take off

there are one or two interesting paper napkin analyses on Slashdot where people run through some reasons why maybe it's not so ludicrous. Also important to remember in the short term economically it's more important it can compete with business fares, instead of economy fairs.

I think the engineering problems are way way more challenging than the economics though. But I doubt that Musk, who has actually put rockets into space, is unaware of these. I'd like to think he has a plan & that talking about this stuff now is a way of giving the human race something to collectively dream about so we have something positive in our lives.

This seems like a very important thing, colonizing other planets should be the future objective of humanity otherwise we will run out of space on this one.
So its important to have people invest in the production of new technologies involving space flight.

Maryland has given transportation pioneer Elon Musk permission to dig tunnels for the high-speed, underground transit system known as a hyperloop that Musk wants to build between New York and Washington.

Pretty sure Elon Musk already is and/or will be the most influential person for humanities achievements for the 21st century. It will be hard to top his pivotal role in humanities achievements over the next 80 years, particularly if he pulls off getting humans established on Mars.

Hyperloop is a pipe dream (lulz) and have you heard his latest brain fart about using rockets to transport people around the world? you have got to be kidding

If other people said it, you'd probably be right. However Musk has a history of delivering on what he talks about. The good thing about him, is he will admit something as not being feasible if it works out that way instead of trying to save face.

This seems like a very important thing, colonizing other planets should be the future objective of humanity otherwise we will run out of space on this one.So its important to have people invest in the production of new technologies involving space flight.

thanks for sharing the post.

IMO this is a terrible reason why we should explore the stars. We can easily handle population growth by having population limits based on how many people we can sustain per country/area. We're already on our way to stability, our "average output" has been stable since ~1950s at about 2.1 children/couple. Our world population will stabilise at 11 billion sometime in 2100.

"We're gonna f*** this one, so we better find another one to f*** up" is a horrible thought :(

Yeah, I don't think that's Elon Musk's reason for doing it anyway, in interviews where I've seen him talk about it, its more of a "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" kind of mentality for him. Take the human race to the stars so that if something terrible happened to Earth, like getting hit by an asteroid or an extinction level solar flare or something, the human race wouldn't be wiped out